In part to balance out my study of history, which I have been getting from Paul Johnson lately (Modern Times), I will soon be turning to Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes. Flipping ahead I struck upon a passage that resonated quite well with one who spent the 90's on the college campus:

Never was the word "community" used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life--"the intelligence community," "the public relations community," the "gay community." The rise of "identity groups"--human ensembles to which a person could "belong," unequivocally and beyond uncertainty and doubt, was noted from the late 1960s by writers in the always self-observing U.S.A...

What ethnic identity politics had in common with fin-de-siecle ethnic nationalism was the insistence that one's group identity consisted in some existential, supposedly primordial, unchangeable and therefore permanent personal characteristic shared with other members of the group, and with no one else. Exclusiveness was all the more essential to it, since the actual differences which marked human communities off from each other were attenuated...

The tragedy of these exclusionary identity politics whether or not it set out to establish independent states was that it could not possibly work. It could only pretend to... The pretense that there was a Black, or Hindu, or Russian or female truth incomprehensible and therefore essentially incommunicable to those outside the group, could not survive outside institutions whose only function was to encourage such views. Islamic fundamentalists who studied physics did not study Islamic physics; Jewish engineers did not learn Chassidic engineering; even the most culturally nationalist Frenchmen or Germans learned that operating in the global village of the scientists and technical experts who made the world work required communication in a single global language analogous to medieval Latin, which happened to be English...

Identity politics and fin-de-siecle nationalism were thus not so much programs, still less effective programs for dealing with the problems of the late twentieth century, but rather emotional reactions to these problems. (pp. 429-30)

So the prattle of "community" arises in the wake of community's departure, just as, I would say, discussion of "incommensurability" typically takes place among those already quite on the same page in other regards. Which is not to trivialize "community" and "incommensurability", themselves very rich themes.

Another distantly related term to throw in here is "experience": the American experience, the user experience, your shopping experience. The bastard child of an all encompassing consumerism and a tawdry philosophical subjectivism, "experience" inflates the trivial into the very stuff of life--because, I suppose, that is where the market and the spiritually impoverished individual can agree.

But is this all really a tragedy as Hobsbawm would have it, or just an innocuous distraction, material for another NPR show (where they take this stuff oh so seriously)? I guess I'll have to dig in and find out what he means.